ARC: Connections: ELMAR: Posting areas: product: call

Related ARContent: Journal of Product Innovation Management

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CALL FOR PAPERS

Journal of Product Innovation Management Special Issue:
“Sales and Innovation”

Companies increasingly realize the importance of hiring workers that not only possess the technical skills to develop new products but also master the abilities to successfully commercialize and sell these newly developed products. Extant NPD literature and practice primarily focuses on employee’s technical skills and innovation management conditions to create high-quality products, while it largely ignores the conditions that make newly developed products a selling succes.

While it is clear that to commercialize new products conviction and support from the sales staff are important, attention in the sales literature to the innovation process and the launch of new products and is extremely limited. Issues, however, such as how to sell new next to existing products, the role of sales staff’s innovation attittude and expected customer demand, the relationship between marketing and sales, and how to motivate sales staff to sell innovations are some of the many issues that come to mind.

This special issue aims at the role of sales force in the company’s innovation process, including activities like personal selling and sales management in successfully commerciallizing and selling product innovations, but also feedback from sales to firms’ NPD teams.

The purpose of this special issue is to provide a forum for articles exploring leading-edge issues of significant academic and managerial interest which have been traditionally under-researched. Submissions about any of the following topics (and/or combinations thereof) are especially encouraged, but not limited to:

• Sales force engaged in selling product innovations
• Selling techniques: sales responsibilities & preparation, personal selling skills,
• Identifying customers for new products,
• Expansion selling of product innovations
• Account management: key account management, relationship selling, cross-selling new products, CRM systems
• The impact of Sales-Marketing integration and RD-Sales integration on selling product innovations.
• Internal marketing of new products to sales force.
• Sales manager’s innovation orientation
• New product adoption by sales persons.
• Sales forecasting & budgeting of newly developed products.
• Recruitment & selection of sales force to sell new products
• Motivation & training, organization & compensation, managing the process of new products.
• Innovating and improving using feedback from the sales force and other FLEs

We would like to encourage submissions that can provide a unique perspective using diverse methodological approaches, and interdisciplinary/international/industry-academic co-author teams. Specifically we encourage authors to bridge the NPD and sales literature using and testing theories that can help establish this underdeveloped area.

All submissions other than invited commentaries will be subject to the standard double-blind review process followed by JPIM. All manuscripts must be original, unpublished works that are not concurrently under review for publication elsewhere.

• Deadline: An electronic copy of the paper should be submitted to a.d.jong@tue.nl by September 30, 2011
• All submissions should conform to the JPIM manuscript submission guidelines available at http://www.pdma.org/journal/AuthorInfo.pdf
• The title page should include the names, titles, professional affiliations, and contact information of the authors
• Clearly identify the corresponding author and provide a list of key words
• The names of the authors should appear on the title page only. Authors should refrain from revealing their identity in the body of the manuscript
• Author(s) of the 10 best submissions will be invited to present their paper on a conference devoted to the special issue.
• Please provide a list and contact information of 5 individuals, unfamiliar with the paper, who would be qualified to review the manuscript.

Editors of Special Issue:

Ad de Jong
Department of Innovation, Technology Entrepreneurship and Marketing
School of Industrial Engineering
Eindhoven University of Technology

Ed Nijssen
Department of Innovation, Technology Entrepreneurship and Marketing
School of Industrial Engineering
Eindhoven University of Technology

Willem Verbeke
Department of Marketing,
Faculty of Business Economics
Erasmus University

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